Shifting gears but not principles

2 April 2011. After reaching a point of relative financial security, i.e., secure against all but an Armageddon created by hyperinflation and collapse of the currency , I have difficulty understanding the drive to make more and more money. Here’s a homey point about how little value money has relative to actual life experience.
Every morning from the beginning of December until the end of April, I have a cup of coffee and a large glass of orange juice while I read the Wall Street Journal – on my patio if weather permits. Once in a while, if home-made cookies are available, I will eat a couple of them or have a piece of raisin toast or an English muffin. This takes about an hour of my waking day. It’s the orange juice I want to describe here, and it is actually a 1 to 4 combination of grapefruit and orange juice. It is simply the best juice I ever drank any place in the world, including at four and five star hotels, in Arizona and Florida orange groves, and in Mexico and Spain where I drank fresh squeezed juice. What makes this juice so special? I believe it is my relation to my one grapefruit and three orange trees and the fruit they produce. All year round I make sure the trees have enough water. During the summer this means flood irrigating them about once a week. Occasionally, I call the nursery and have them prune and inspect the trees. I also treat them with iron once or twice a year. During harvest season, once or twice a week I pick enough fruit to squeeze a gallon of juice which my son and I drink it up. When I say squeeze I mean squeeze by hand. All of these activities imbue the juice with the quality that makes it the best in the world. I am connected to the juice by my efforts to make sure it exists. No amount of money will do the same thing because money is simply a medium for representing value, not the representation of lived positive experience.
When I travel and drink juices there, or from May through November when I am reduced to buying very expensive fresh juice as a replacement. I experience juice with a more disconnected quality. It’s ironic to me that this morning experience also ties me to the small plot of urban land I own in the middle of this hot desert. I wish I liked apple juice more than orange juice because then I could move back where the apple trees grow, the seasons are as I grew up, and I could sit outside on summer evenings. Oh the choices we make.